==== Project: Import of educational data sets available on the internet ====

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'''Brief explanation''': There are many internet pages providing data sets for educational and study purposes for many different areas (astrophysics, statistics, medicine, etc.). Some tools used in the scientific area provide some "wrappers" for such online sources and allow the user to easily play around with those data sets in the applications whereas the technical details like fetching of data from the server and parsing are done completely transparent for the user. The goal of this project is to add similar functionality to LabPlot. There will be a wizard where the user can select from a thematically grouped list of data sets available online. The internal description of such an online data set should contain the URL with the actual file that needs to be downloaded and the settings for LabPlot's data parser (separator, column names and data types, etc.). The data fetched once should be cached so there is no need to fetch from the web again. Here we can have a look maybe at KStars for how to implement such a caching strategy and maybe even re-use some code from KStars.

+

In addition to the list of pre-defined online sources, we need to elaborate how the user can add new online data sets (together with all the required parametrization) and publish the settings to make them available for everybody.

+

+

'''Expected results''': We want to be able to easily import the educational data sets available on the internet.

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'''Knowledge Prerequisite''': C++, Qt

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'''Mentor''': TBD

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=== Kdenlive ===

=== Kdenlive ===

Revision as of 21:06, 26 December 2018

Guidelines

Information for Students

These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.

Becoming accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general KDE community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. KDE is really big!

If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the general KDE development list kde-devel@kde.org. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.

Note

These are all proposals! We are open to new ideas you might have!! Do you have an awesome idea you want to work on with KDE but that is not among the ideas below? That's cool. We love that! But please do us a favor: Get in touch with a mentor early on and make sure your project is realistic and within the scope of KDE.

Adding a Proposal

Project:

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

if the application is not widely known, a description of what it does and where its code lives

a brief explanation

the expected results

pre-requisites for working on your project

if applicable, links to more information or discussions

mailing list or IRC channel for your application/library/module

your name and email address for contact (if you're willing to be a mentor)

Ideas with no mentors listed and their contact info will be removed **

If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.

Ideas

Your Own Idea

Project: Something that you're totally excited about

Brief explanation: Do you have an awesome idea you want to work on with KDE but that is not among the ideas below? That's cool. We love that! But please do us a favor: Get in touch with a mentor early on and make sure your project is realistic and within the scope of KDE. That will spare you and us a lot of frustration.

digiKam

Project: AI Face Recognition with OpenCV DNN module

Brief Explanation: With GoSC 2016, we proposed a project to implement an AI extension to the digiKam core face recognition. The project used the Dlib C++ API, but we were not satisfied by the results, as the algorithm gave poor performance. This choice also introduced a huge backport of low level codes which we don't want to maintain. So, even though the project proposed a somewhat suitable solution to provide an AI face recognition processor based on deep-learning, this one was not really powerful and functional enough. For now, this section of code about Dlib DNN extension is disabled in digiKam core.

As digiKam core already depends on OpenCV library to perform complex image processing, and as OpenCV >= 3.3 release provide a new OpenCV DNN (Deep Neural Network) module, the goal now is to port the current digiKam core face recognition DNN extension to new OpenCV API and write all unit tests to validate the algorithm usability, efficiency, and performance, while learning and recognizing faces automatically.

Expected Results:

Provide a suitable Face recognition based on DNN OpenCV API, with unit test, and documentation.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, OpenCV, digiKam

Mentors: Maik Qualmann and Gilles Caulier

Project: Zoomable and Resizable Brush for Healing Clone Tool

Brief Explanation: With GoSC 2016, we have proposed a project to implement an Healing Clone tool for digiKam image editor to be able to remove unwanted artifacts from images. The student has implemented the basis without a zoomable canvas and without the resizable brush support. Due to this lack of features, the tools cannot be used in production by end-users.

This section of code about healing clone tool is currently disabled in digiKam core.

The goal of this project is to implement the missing feature for the Healing Clone tool in image editor, including the unit-tests and the documentation.

Project: Factoring all Export Tools with new Export API

Brief Explanation: With GoSC 2018, we proposed a project to implement a huge factorization and improvements with all digiKam export to web service tools. Our student fixed plenty of code using OAuth version 2 authentification, has simplified classes, and started to write a new API to factorize all these tools, including a common Wizard dialog. Even if the export tools implementation are now better, they do not use the new API and always run as a stand alone session in digiKam core. Due to this fact, the Web Service tools are not yet usable in digiKam Batch Queue Manager as single step runnable at end of a queue processing. So the section of code about factored export tools API is currently disabled in digiKam core. This year, the project will be to fix that.

Expected Results:

Start to use every the new export tools API, use the new Wizard dialog, factoring codes everywhere, and introduce all export tools to BQM. Write unit tests, and documentation.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, digiKam

Mentors: Maik Qualmann and Gilles Caulier

Krita

Krita: digital painting for artists. It supports creating images from scratch from beginning to end. Krita is a complex application and developers need to have a fair amount of experience in order to be able to do something.

Krita is a widely used digital painting application for professional artists. Last year, Krita gained the ability to create hand-drawn 2D animations, among other new features. For this year, projects that the Krita team would be interested in include the following ideas.

Note that we're always open to ideas you bring in yourself: if you're passionate about something you've come up with yourself, that you want for Krita, that's a big plus for us.

We also expect prospective students to submit at least three patches for bugs or wishes or small features. We want to know how good you are! See https://phabricator.kde.org/T7724 for some smaller tasks that you could work on that are not bugs.

Project: Integrating the MyPaint Brush Engine

Brief Explanation: The MyPaint brush engine has been separated from the MyPaint application and has been completely rewritten. Artists still like the mypaint brush engine a lot and it would be great to have the engine integrated in Krita as a new brush engine. Libmypaint can be found here: https://github.com/mypaint/libmypaint and the brush set here: https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint-brushes . The first goal is to integreate libmypaint in a Krita brushengine and make it load the brushes. The second goal is to expose the MyPaint brush options in Krita's brush editor and allow the modification and creation of MyPaint brushes in Krita. GIMP is an example of an application that has already integrated the MyPaint brush engine.

Expected Results:

Artists should be able to effectively paint with MyPaint brushes in Krita.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, Krita

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

Project: Supporting Vertical Text and SVG2 Text in the Text Shape

Brief Explanation: Krita's Text Shape was rewritten for Krita 4.0. It is now SVG based, instead of ODF. There are many things lacking, though. The original goal was to support SVG2. Currently the text shape only supports SVG1. There is no automatic wordwrap and vertical text (e.g. Chinese and Japanese) is not supported either. The goal of this project is to support wordwrap and vertical text layout. Other improvements to the text shape can be proposed as well. The level of this project is advanced.

Expected Results:

Artists should be able to create and edit vertical text. Text shapes should be able to automatically wrap text to the bounding box.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, Krita, SVG, Typography, Text Layout

Level Advanced

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

Project: Add New Fill Layer Types

Brief Explanation: Fill layers are layers that automatically generate content. Krita currently has two types of fill layers: Color and Pattern. There used to be another type that generated content dynamically using the OpenShiva scripting language. However, that language hasn't been maintained for a long time. The goal of this project is to add a new dynamic fill layer types that could fill an area with different effects such as perlin and other types of noise, clouds, hatching, fractals.

Expected Results:

Several new fill layer types that allow the user to add dynamically generated content as a layer in the layer stack

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, Krita

Level Medium

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

Project: Port Krita to Android OR iOS

Brief Explanation: Krita is currently only available on Windows, macOS and Linux. The goal of this project is to port the desktop version of Krita to one mobile operating system, either Android or iOS. This involves making sure all (or a viable subset of) Krita's dependencies are available on the target platform, as well as Krita itself.

Expected Results:

A build of Krita that starts on either mobile OS and shows an image. Further integration with either mobile OS would be nice, but is an extra. Furthermore, the build system and build scripts need to be documented, complete and maintainable.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, Krita, CMake, Android or iOS. You also need to have access to test hardware.

Level Advanced

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

Project: Improve Krita for Touch Systems

Brief Explanation: Krita Gemini/Krita Sketch were version of Krita based on QtQuick 1 that provided a decent touch-only experience. Because of the technical limitations of QtQuick 2, the approach used in Gemini and Sketch is no longer viable. Since Krita 4, there is a QtQuick2 based touch docker that mimics the button bar found on some wacom devices. This is not configurable, and quite limited. This project involves working with Krita's UX designers and users to define a new approach to supporting touch devices, then implementing that support.

Expected Results:

Artists should be able to work with Krita on a touch-only device such as a Surface Pro or Wacom Mobile Studio without wanting to chop their devices in two.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, Krita

Level Medium

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

Project: SVG Mesh Gradients

Brief Explanation: Even though Mesh Gradients are not officially part of the truncated SVG2 specification anymore, having a second implementation next to Inkscape would help improving the standard. Plus, mesh gradients are very useful for artists. This project entails implementing a new gradient type. Whether this should be based on QGradient or not is up for discussion. The gradients should render exactly the same as in inkscape. See https://svgwg.org/svg-next/pservers.html#MeshGradientElement.

Expected Results:

A new gradient type, UI to create and edit these gradients and apply them. Gradients should work both on vector objects as well as on paint layers.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C, C++, Qt, Krita, SVG, Inkscape

Level Advanced

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

Project: Extending Animation Support for curves

Brief Explanation: In Krita, you can already add curves that could be applied to some properties of a layer, like opacity, animating those properties. We want the animation support extended by allowing users to place masks (filter masks, transformation masks, transparency masks) on the timeline and animate their properties using curves. Every property of a layer or mask placed on the timeline should be animatable.

Expected results:

Implementation of a gui for applying the curve settings to one or more properties of a mask or layer

Implementation of the actual rendering of the properties in the frames

Saving of these settings

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C++ and Qt

Level Advanced

Mentor: Jouni Pentikainen (tyyppi on IRC)

Project: Taking the Shape Brush to the next level

Brief Explanation: Krita has a number of interesting brush engines. One of them is the Shape Brush engine. Inspired by Alchemy, the shape brush "throws" shapes on the canvas. The current implementation is limited to geometric shapes. We want the brush engine to be extended to make it possible to load vector shapes defined as PDF or SVG and use those to draw on the canvas as well. Other improvements are the addition of Feathering, an outline mode, edge sharpening and background textures.

Expected Results: A revamped and exciting shapes brush

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C++, Qt, Krita

Level Medium

Mentor: Boudewijn Rempt (IRC: boud)

GCompris

GCompris is a high quality educational software suite, including a large number of activities for children aged 2 to 10.

KDE Partition Manager

KDE Partition Manager is a utility program to help you manage the disk devices, partitions and file systems on your computer. It allows you to easily create, copy, move, delete, resize without losing data, backup and restore partitions. Developer mail list.

Kopete

LabPlot

LabPlot is a KDE-application for interactive graphing and analysis of scientific data. LabPlot provides an easy way to create, manage and edit plots and to perform data analysis. Labplot is part of the KDE Edu team.

Project: Import of educational data sets available on the internet

Brief explanation: There are many internet pages providing data sets for educational and study purposes for many different areas (astrophysics, statistics, medicine, etc.). Some tools used in the scientific area provide some "wrappers" for such online sources and allow the user to easily play around with those data sets in the applications whereas the technical details like fetching of data from the server and parsing are done completely transparent for the user. The goal of this project is to add similar functionality to LabPlot. There will be a wizard where the user can select from a thematically grouped list of data sets available online. The internal description of such an online data set should contain the URL with the actual file that needs to be downloaded and the settings for LabPlot's data parser (separator, column names and data types, etc.). The data fetched once should be cached so there is no need to fetch from the web again. Here we can have a look maybe at KStars for how to implement such a caching strategy and maybe even re-use some code from KStars.
In addition to the list of pre-defined online sources, we need to elaborate how the user can add new online data sets (together with all the required parametrization) and publish the settings to make them available for everybody.

Expected results: We want to be able to easily import the educational data sets available on the internet.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt

Mentor: TBD

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is a KDE-application for professional video editors. It supports hundreds of video formats and all the features you can expect from a non-linear video editor, including some advanced features like timeline preview rendering, proxy clips and more.

Project: Evolving Titler tool

Current code is using XML description, drawn by our "kdenlivetitle" MLT module, using old QPainter engine.
This engines has limitations that blocks interesting features.
Few years ago, an upstream module appeared in MLT, named "WebVfx", which uses QML to do similar things with much more flexibility.

We would like to be able to load current XML titles and convert them automatically to QML format, and generate QML from our current GUI. Then the GUI could evolve to integrate new features, in accordance to our community requests & design group recommendations.

Expected Results: A titler using QML backend

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C++, QML

Level Medium

Mentor: Vincent Pinon (IRC: vpinon)

Choqok

Get in touch on IRC (#choqok).

KStars

KStars is free, open source, cross-platform Astronomy Software. It provides an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time.

Project: Deep Sky Object Overhaul

Brief explanation: KStars supports many deep sky objects (DSOs) including galaxies, nebulae, supernovae, clusters and more. Currently, some deep sky catalogs are stored in simple space separated text format where they are parsed into KStars directly or into KStars Deep Sky Component SQLite3 database which is then loaded in KStars. However, since all DSOs are loaded at once into memory, this limits the size of catalogs within KStars. A solution similar to how dynamic stars are cached in and out of memory must be developed for DSOs. Furthermore, all catalog entries should have their trixels indexed so that they can be efficiently drawn unto the sky map. Another issue is that catalogs can overlap since there is no cross-identification of various catalogs. For example, Andromeda galaxy exists in Messier catalog as M31, and exists in NGC catalog as NGC 224. The database should support an ability to cross-identify objects from all supported and future catalogs.

Expected results:

Convert all text-format catalogs to SQLite3 database.

Develop master DSO database where cross-identification of objects is supported. Master database can support addon downloadable catalogs where they can be merged once downloaded by the user.

Import of The Principal Galaxy Catalog, 2003 Version (PGC2003) which contains ~1 million galaxies into KStars as a downloadable addon.

Caching and drawing optimizations for large catalogs.

Cross-identification for all supported DSO catalogs including, but not limited too: NGC/IC/Messier/Arp/PGC/LDN

Trixel indexation for all DSOs. Implementation of improved drawing cached routine in KStars for DSOs similar to stars.

All necessary updates within KStars maps, tools and dialogs to reflect the above changes.

Project: FITSViewer & Photometry Improvements

Brief explanation: The FITSViewer is used to display FITS images as captured by cameras or opened by the user. It supports 8, 16, 32, and 64bit formats with either a single channel (Mono or Bayer) or RGB cube. The goal for this project is to provide efficient and intuitive controls for:

Noise Calculation: Calculate the overall Signal-to-Noise (SNR) radio for the overall image, or a specific subframe of the image.

Sky Glow Computation: Estimation of Sky Glow component in image of various exposures. Each captured image is affected by multiple sources of noise, only of which is the sky glow which in turn is affected by the atmosphere, pollution, and artificial sources (e.g. light). The objective is to propose to the user the optimum exposure time given the sky glow contribution to the image.

Mask Overlay: Ability to select custom mask over stars to aid in focusing and photometry.

Photometry: KStars includes SEP which can be used to extract sources from stellar images and also performs aperture photometry. A new tool should be developed to aid the users to perform photometric work with the images including reduction of images (darks & flats) with various optimization/algorithmic settings. Additionally, the tool provides means for aperture photometry calculations as well.

Since FITSViews typically deals with very high-resolution images, such calculations can be very computationally expensive. It is expected that a very efficient multi-threaded code to be developed to take advantage of all the available cores on the system and any hardware or instruction set optimizations to achieve the smoothest user experience.
Expected results:

Project: Implement Qt3D backend for KStars

Brief explanation: The Skymap in KStars desktop version is currently built using QPainter and 2D drawing primitives. In order to take advantage of advances in modern GPU hardware and to present a stunning visual view of the night sky, a 3D backend is desired. Qt 3D provides functionality for near-realtime simulation systems with support for 2D and 3D rendering in both Qt C++ and Qt Quick applications. Within KStars, SkyPainter provides a backend-agnostic class for drawing object unto the skymap regardless of the backend. Previously, an experimental OpenGL backend was developed but was later deprecated due to drawing issues. Since Qt3D provides an abstraction to the backend framework (OpenGL/Vulkan/DirectX), it presents a very flexible framework for building future-proof 3D applications.

Expected results:

Create Qt3D based backend to draw all objects currently implemented by QPainter backend.

Peruse

Peruse is a comic book reader application by KDE, which is designed to work both on touch based devices, and on the traditional desktop. Additionally, it has a tool called Peruse Creator which is designed to create comic books for use with Peruse and any other CBZ capable comic book reader. It has rudimentary support for the Advanced Comic Book Format, which is a metadata container for comic book archives (CBR, CBZ and so on).

KDevelop

Xdg-desktop-portal-kde

KDE Connect

KDE Connect is a project that enables all your devices to communicate with each other.

KDE Connect for Windows port

We want to improve the integration of KDE Connect with the Windows system. As of now, KDE Connect builds on Windows (using Craft) and some plugins have been ported, but it's still unstable and incomplete. This project should aim to implement all the missing plugins, plus provide full integration with the OS: Send-to integration from the right-click menu, making the notifications appear in the Windows 10 notifications bar, etc. By the end of the project, we should have a releaseable installer for KDE Connect on Windows and/or KDE Connect published on the Windows app store.

Purpose

The Purpose framework offers the possibility to create integrate services and actions on any application without having to implement them specifically. Purpose will offer them mechanisms to list the different alternatives to execute given the requested action type and will facilitate components so that all the plugins can receive all the information they need.

Barcode scanning infrastructure

Purpose enables application developers to use features without implementing them themselves. It offers multiple alternatives to achieve a goal. Right now it supports sharing files and URLs.

An interesting use case for it would be scanning barcodes. An application developer that wants to scan a barcode would ask Purpose for it. Purpose would offer multiple ways of doing it, e.g. from a local file, from the local camera or from a via KDE Connect connected phone. Purpose would then return the data to the application.

Goal of this task is to have a framework for scanning barcodes as well as multiple implementations. This consists of:
- Adding a new Plugin type to Purpose
- A import from file backend
- A local camera backend
- A KDE Connect backend
- One or more applications using it, e.g. Itinerary or a barcode scan app for Plasma Mobile

Areas of knowledge: Basic understanding of C++ and Qt5 is required. Experience with Java/Android for the KDE Connect backend is beneficial.